Gerald Moira (1867-1959)

Gerald Moira worked in different styles and mediums. His paintings, as Gleeson White explained in 1898, make him a member of “the school of J. W. Waterhouse, R.A.,” a school defined by “the use of brilliant pigments, and in the choice of poetic themes for a treatment which is
neither wholly archaic nor wholly realistic” (227). Moira was one of those late-nineteenth-century artists, who “would seem to have studied
the Primitives, the missal painters, and early Flemish school, no less than the colour prints of Japan. They try to make their harmonies in orange and
ultramarine, in blood reds and iridescent blue-greens as
complete as the more subtle chords of Corot or the
restrained splendour of Titian” (227). His second style or mode involves decorative art in the form of programs of large plaster panels created in association with the sculptor Lynn Jenkins. Discussing their most famous collaboration, a series of panels for the Tocadero restaurant at Piccadilly Circus, White explains:

The panels, placed high up on the walls, are six
feet in height, and together ninety feet in length.
The reliefs were cast in fibrous plaster from models
in clay. The colouring, which is by Mr. Moira,
has I been laid on thickly and wiped off from
those portions in higher relief. Scarce any definition
is gained by actual painting, except so
far as proved to be necessary to emphasise
the shadows when the whole was finally in
position. Thus the colour does but confirm the
modelling by strengthening the hollows, and throw-
ing the relief in lighter tones. Here and there gold
and silver are freely used with most satisfactory
effect. The colour, although bright, is cool, and
suffers no little from the less reticent scheme applied
to the architectural features of the rather ornate
building. [234]

Ernest Hall Watt commissioned a similar but smaller project for the library of his house at Bishop Burton near Beverley. The seventeen painted bas reliefs illustrated poems by English and American poets from Shakespeare and Herrick through Longfellow, Tennyson, and Swinburne.